What is Holistic Dermatology and Why Do We Need it?

“I was very interested, even as a boy, in psychosomatics and their effect on health, and that’s what I entered medical school with excitement about. I left that area after my internship eight years before psycho-immunology became psycho neuro-immunology as a legitimate field. I’ve been watching all these things develop, well after I’ve been excited about them and want to just do more and more in this area.”


“Now what does it feel like to be this person who thinks in a way that no one else thinks?”


“It’s a variety things it’s sometimes very lonely, and sometimes very exciting. Right now I’m feeling excited about it, but it is a little frustrating to be seeing what’s going to happen in the next ten or twenty years in and feel like you’re yelling in a crowded mall and nobody hears you, yes.”


“So what do you see coming down the pike in the next few years?”


“Well I think that are people in government that are going to have to make some choices, because you know for instance smoking was suspected as a problem forty, fifty, sixty years ago. People called cigarettes cancer sticks when I was a teenager, but it was not officially a dangerous pastime, even chain-smoking. People knew that it probably caused trouble, but you couldn’t go into court and say, “This is a problem; tell the guy in back of me to stop smoking in the cubicle next to me.” This it wasn’t a proven thing. We have lots and lots of things out there that are causing us tremendous harm, but they’re not proven yet, and it’ll take a generation before they’re really proven.
I think that one is the big decisions going is whether we will begin facing and getting on top of things when we suspect and have lots and lots of input and evidence that they’re causing trouble before we actually have all the death and destruction and harm that comes from it, and I think that people are going to begin to become aware that maybe we shouldn’t have to wait a full generation before we do this.”

 “So what a summit the items that you’re referring to well I think is a big controversy now about a about mercury and its effect on other kinds of disorders?”


“We know there’s a lot of problems with heavy metal toxicity and there are different areas our legal structure in you know in our plan on a planet where their problems open mining of Mercury, burning high mercury fuels Cole that floats across the country, and then and then deposits in a fish that pregnant women in New York State are only allowed to eat fish once a month!

It’s going to be a problem there… so we haven’t really been able to tackle these things. That’s one the of the 80,000 chemicals that we have in use today there are creeping into our food supply, and our area, and our water, there a lot of those through causing some harming we’ve got to begin to decide whether we want to accept the burden. We’re seeing disorders that didn’t exist before, like autism which used to be a few at a hundred thousand and now are you know 130 and have whenever 130 people develop autism kids and there’s a lot of suspicion that contribution by mercury in the air, the water, by the electromagnetic forces emitted everywhere, which doesn’t help. We don’t have proof on this, but there’s a their smoke, and as one says, and you know where there’s smoke they may be fire.”


New light on the Brain-Immune System link

magnifyingglassA recent discovery has show that the lymphatic system, previously thought not to involve the brain, actually extends into the brain.

From my illnesses as a boy, I had such a strong sense that the mind influenced illness, that I began to look for and actually do studies on the relationship between the brain and the immune system. Back around 1970, I began visiting researchers in the field of what both Dr. George Solomon (and Alfred Amkraut) called “psychoimmunology.” I wrote a protocol for such a study at Langly Porter Institute in San Francisco, and later got a small grant to do a study at Albert Einstein COM on Psychologic factors and breast cancer.

This field later took on the more legitimate title of “Psycho-neuro-immunolgy”, bolstered by studies on conditioning the immune response by conditioning, done by Dr Robert Ader at the University of Rochester.

A major step in further demonstrating the validity of this connection between the brain and the immune system came from work by Dr Candace Pert, a neuroscientist who teamed up with her Immunologist husband to show that substances secreted by one organ could affect other organs in the body, including the brain and the immune system.

So it is fascinating to see that yet another link has been discovered between the brain and the immune system, a connection I have watched become more recognized as real over the past 5 decades.

To your health,

Alan M Dattner, MD

Holistic Dermatology


What’s Your Skin Have to Do with The Earth’s Surface?

6a00e55255b4628834017eeab67088970d-200wiWe have an opportunity, to champion the health of the skin of the planet on which we live. The health of that layer affects all life on Earth, and subsequently the health of humans.

Many parallels can be drawn between the health of our environmental “skin” and the skin of the individual.  By drawing on these parallels, we can make it easier to have a clear overview of environmental issues that affect the health of the human body and the skin in particular.

For example, we can look at how a “chemical burn” to the Ozone layer of the earth results in more danger of a sunburn to various layers of the skin. Exploring the causes of the “chemical burn” and the different ways to prevent it, educating ourselves and the public, and engaging everyone in finding a win-win solution to the problem makes this into an exciting game.

The goal is to improve health and well-being by improving conditions in the surface of the earth in which we live.

To our health,

-Dr. Dattner

Holistic Dermatology
New York

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As always, the content of this blog is for information and education purposes only, and should not be used to diagnose or treat illness; please see your physician for care.